Winners

Shell International Best Documentary on a Contemporary Issue

Afghan Star

Director:

Havana Marking

Executive Producers:

Martin Herring, Mike Lerner, Jahid Mohseni

Production Cº:

Roast Beef ProductionsMore 4

Afghan Star was watched by a third of the population of Afghanistan. Over 11 million people, in voting for their favourites, experienced a taste of democracy.Afghan Star is a small but significant unifying force for the country's diverse ethnic groups; as the programme's presenter Daod Sediqi says, 'the aim is to take the people’s hand from weapons to music'.

Best Documentary on the Arts

The Mona Lisa Curse

Director:

Mandy Chang

Executive Producer:

Nicholas Kent

Production Cº:

Oxford Film and TelevisionChannel 4

The Mona Lisa Curse is a timely polemic by internationally renowned art critic Robert Hughes which examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it, have radically changed in the last 50 years.

History Today Award for the Best Historical Documentary

Thriller in Manila

Director:

John Dower

Executive Producer:

John Smithson

Writer:

John Dower

Production Cº:

Darlow Smithson ProductionsMore 4

Joe Frazier takes British filmmaker, John Dower, back to the most hyped boxing match in history. Frazier, now 63, takes British filmmaker, John Dower, back 33 years to the most hyped boxing match in history, and beyond. Frazier has never forgiven Ali for the racial taunting leading up to the fight in which he called Frazier 'gorilla' and 'uncle Tom' - the worst possible insult for a fellow black man.

Best Science Documentary

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

Director/Producer:

Sacha Mirzoeff

Executive Producer:

Brian Leith

Writer:

David Attenborough

Production Cº:

BBC Natural History Unit/Open UniversityBBC One

David Attenborough asks three key questions: how and why did Darwin come up with his theory of evolution? Why do we think he was right? And why is it more important now than ever before?

Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can’t take “no” for an answer. They have an unusual hobby, posing as top executives of Corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, they lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate nemeses in ever more extreme ways - basically doing everything they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.

Best Drama Documentary

House of Saddam

Directors:

Alex Holmes, Jim O’Hanlon

Producer:

Steve Lightfoot

Executive Producers:

Hilary Salmon, Alex Holmes

Writers:

Alex Holmes, Stephen Butchard

Production Cº:

BBC Productions/HBOBBC Two

House Of Saddam is a gripping drama series about one of the world's most terrifying regimes and its subsequent downfall. This BBC/HBO co-production tells the story of the opulent lifestyle of Saddam Hussein and his inner circle, set against a backdrop of war and the tragedies of the Iraqi people.

Envy Award for Best Documentary Series

Iran and the West

Directors:

Dai Richards, Delphine Jaudeau, Paul Mitchell

Producers:

Brian Lapping, Louise Norman

Series Producer:

Norma Percy

Production Cº:

Brook Lapping ProductionsBBC Two

Jimmy Carter talks on television for the first time about the episode that, more than any other, led American voters to eject him from the presidency: Iran's seizure of the US embassy in Tehran. Exclusive interviews with two ex-Presidents of Iran – Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989 to 1997) and Mohammad Khatami (1997 to 2005) – give this programme unique authority. The series tells the inside stories of struggles, in their own government and with the West.

UK Film Council Award for Best Cinema Documentary

Burma VJ

Director:

Anders Østergaard

Producer:

Lisa-Lense Moller

Writers:

Anders Østergaard, Jan Krogsgaard

Production Cº:

Magic Hour FilmsHuman Rights Watch Int. Film Festival

Going beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker, Anders Østergaard, brings us close to Burma’s video journalists who insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country despite risking torture and life in jail. Armed with small handycams they make their undercover reportages, smuggle the material out of the country, have it broadcast back into Burma via satellite and offered as free usage for international media.

Best Newcomer

Storyville: I’m Not Dead Yet

Director:

Elizabeth Stopford

Producer:

John Battsek

Production Cº:

Passion Pictures LtdBBC Four

A unique and personal film about the inheritance of a Gothic home and a family's unspoken past.

Trustees' Award

Norma Percy

For the past twenty years, Norma Percy has been responsible with Brian Lapping for series in which Presidents, Prime Ministers and their top advisors re-create what happened behind closed doors when big political decisions are made.

A BBC policy statement in 1995 described them as ‘virtually a new genre of documentary that retells momentous events from the recent past with meticulous objectivity’.

A leading article in The Guardian In Praise of Norma Percy (17 February 2009) stated:
“Her documentaries stand out ...most of all for the extraordinary range of political leaders who agree to appear on them ...Every significant international story seems to have its Percy film. The Second Russian Revolution (1991) followed the fall of the Soviet Union. The Death of Yugoslavia (1995) traced the causes and consequences of the Balkan wars. Two series, The 50 Years War (1998) and Elusive Peace (2005) examined the Israeli-Arab conflict, and the peace process that approached success but never achieved it, while Endgame in Ireland (2001) explained how a conflict was resolved. And now Iran and the West ...produced by Percy, working with executive producer Lapping, their company sustains the gold standard of documentary making.”

These series for BBC Two - and Avenging Terror (2001) and Playing the China Card (1999) for Channel 4 - have won dozens of major awards including a prime time Emmy for Watergate in 1994, two BAFTA’s, four Royal Television Society awards, three Columbia University duPont journalism awards, and three US Peabody awards.

She was awarded an honorary doctorate from City University in 2004, the James Cameron prize for the year's outstanding journalism (print and broadcast) in 2000 and in 2003, and is a fellow of the Royal Television Society; Percy and Lapping jointly received the BAFTA Alan Clarke award in 2003 and the RTS Judges award in 1996.

Brought up in New York, she studied politics at Oberlin College, before coming to England to do a postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. She then spent six years as a researcher in the House of Commons where she really began to learn about politics (mainly in the Strangers’ Bar). It was this expertise that brought her to television; Brian Lapping offered her a job at Granada on a series about what was wrong with Parliament - for one year only.

She stayed for 15 years, working with him on various ways to depict politics on television: ‘journalists’ reconstructions’ (of Cabinet and EU meetings) then Hypotheticals and drama docs Breakthrough at Reykjavik (1987) and Countdown to War (1989). Lapping’s 14-part End of Empire (1985), based on archive film and interviews with colonial revolutionaries and British rulers became the model for their later work. She went with Lapping when he set up as an independent in 1988 and was a founding director of Brook Lapping in 1997.

Norma Percy is married to Steve Jones, broadcaster, author, journalist and Professor of Genetics at University College London.